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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly had an affair with Kimberly Powell, the company’s health-care vice president who reports directly to him, The New York Times reported, as cited by g1. The newspaper said the two were reportedly seen together at a hotel in San Jose, California, during a Nvidia conference in March, but said it had not seen the video that allegedly recorded the interaction. The report was based on five former company employees.

The case follows another affair attributed to Huang, involving Chinese executive Alice Huang. According to g1, Nvidia’s board opened an investigation into possible risks to the company’s information and advanced artificial-intelligence chips. The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove Huang, while an Elos Ayta estimate put the company’s market-value loss since the reports began at US$1.081 trillion.

Sources: g1

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United says it won’t allow personal AI assistants to book tickets on its site, citing concerns that they could expose customer data, make unauthorized purchases and fail to meet federal requirements. Those requirements include having passengers confirm that their bags do not contain explosives. Agents will still be able to show United flights, but they won’t be able to complete transactions or interact directly with United accounts.

The Verge, citing The Wall Street Journal, reports that the company has not yet seen many attempts to use such agents to book flights. CEO Scott Kirby said he did not want to create another middleman, but United says it could reconsider the decision if sufficient protections for travelers are established. The restriction could limit the usefulness of assistants such as Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots.

Sources: The Verge

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Microsoft described an agent developed with Novo Nordisk for secondary analysis of clinical-trial data. The system interprets questions, inspects data, writes and executes code, examines the results, and may revise its approach before returning a summary and visualization. According to Microsoft, the solution was reimplemented as a hosted agent in Microsoft Foundry after an initial version ran in Azure Container Apps, with PostgreSQL and dynamic sessions for isolated code execution.

In Foundry, the platform manages the endpoint, agent identity, state persistence, scaling, and session lifecycle. Each session receives a VM-isolated environment, with compute provisioned on demand. Sid Prabhu of Novo Nordisk said the change enabled the company to deliver a reliable and secure experience to thousands of researchers faster, without building and operating all the infrastructure itself.

Sources: Microsoft

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Wired reports that it used OpenAI’s GPT-6 Sol to train a virtual version of Microduck, a robot developed by Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face, to walk around a room and identify Bengal cats. The author says the coding and training took a few hours, using Nous Research’s Hermes agent and an Nvidia DGX Spark as well. The process used Nvidia’s Isaac Sim to control the robot, assess videos of its performance and suggest training adjustments. The model got it to walk without toppling over, but did not properly reproduce a moonwalk.

According to Wired, University of California, Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg used OpenAI’s Astra with Nvidia’s Newton tool to create a 3D simulation of a robot in about an hour. Nvidia researcher Jim Fan says language models can now access models that control physical actions. Fan, Goldberg and others also open sourced the Aspire robotics framework, which lets a robot discover and use new skills.

Sources: Wired

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British startup Fractile has raised $720 million in a Series C led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Redpoint, with backing from the Sovereign AI Fund. The British government said the company was valued at more than £5 billion; the Financial Times and a Reuters source reported that the valuation may be close to $7 billion.

Fractile is developing purpose-built AI chips as well as a machine-learning compiler to speed up the execution of language models. After a strategic pivot, its design began stacking DRAM on top of each chip to try to reduce the trade-off between memory capacity and speed. In a LinkedIn post, CEO Walter Goodwin said the funding will allow the company to ship its first chips and systems next year, although there is still substantial work ahead.

Sources: TechCrunch

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Bloomberg, cited by TechCrunch, reported that House Republicans are preparing to subpoena Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang if he does not respond by the end of Wednesday to a request for a joint, closed-door briefing. The lawmakers want to question him about his alleged relationship with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive suspected of being a Chinese spy.

House China committee Chairman John Moolenaar told Fox Business that Huang would likely be subpoenaed if he declines the invitation. Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his committee was preparing the subpoena. Nvidia did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Sources: TechCrunch

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Google announced the Gemini Decisions API, available through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio. The company says the endpoint uses Gemini Decision 1 to evaluate up to 1,000 independent yes/no, multiple-choice and rubric-scoring questions against the same multimodal input, including text, images, audio, video and PDFs of up to 256K tokens. Responses include probabilities and confidence scores from 0 to 1.

Google says the model returns results in a single pass, with 150–250 milliseconds of end-to-end latency, a cost of $0.10 per 1 million input tokens and no output-token charges. The company also says Gemini Decision 1 had the best calibration performance across its benchmarks and was nearly five times cheaper than Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite with the Interactions API on the shared benchmark suite.

Sources: Google AI Blog

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The AI Reality Report, conducted by consulting firm Avanade, says 64% of Brazilian companies invest in artificial intelligence without calculating whether they will see a financial return. Overall sentiment is positive: 67% see benefits in these investments, above the global average of 59%, but only 51% say they perceive economic gains. Increased employee productivity is among the main benefits cited.

The survey also indicates that 77% of companies consider training their teams to use AI urgent, while 51% point to cybersecurity and privacy challenges. In addition, 79.6% acknowledge that companies consider themselves more advanced in AI than they actually are, and 70.9% say their systems still cannot access all available data. The survey was conducted between August and September among 230 professionals in leadership positions at Brazilian companies with annual revenue above US$500 million.

Sources: Tecnoblog

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Startup Tau Robotics has begun sending humanoid robots to provide cleaning services in San Francisco homes. According to MIT Technology Review Brasil, the machines are still controlled remotely by operators who monitor the work through cameras and, for tasks such as making beds and folding clothes, directly guide their movements. The robots collect data from these activities to train more autonomous successors.

The experience described by MIT Technology Review Brasil showed machines that can clean but are slow. The equipment is about 1.37 meters tall, uses 3D-printed pincers, and initially cost US$30 for one hour with a single robot; Tau now offers weekly cleaning with two robots for US$60 or a one-off visit for US$100. Cornelia Weinzierl, Tau’s co-founder, says the robots can already vacuum and mop without human assistance, although tasks such as folding clothes still require guidance.

Sources: MIT Technology Review Brasil

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Tether AI Research introduced BotPsy, a 0.8-billion-parameter model built on Qwen3.5-0.8B for function calling, agentic workflows and on-device deployment. The assistant uses tools for tasks including web research, travel, commerce, device control, files, calendars and messaging. The company says it is best suited to low- and medium-difficulty tasks and helps keep user data private.

Tether AI Research says BotPsy outperformed every tested model with up to 1.2 billion parameters across six tool-use and agentic benchmarks, while also beating Qwen3.5-2B-Think — 2.5 times larger — on five of them. However, the model can still make mistakes, performs worse in lower-resource languages and is not intended for high-stakes use. BotPsy is available in safetensors and GGUF formats.

Sources: Hugging Face

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NVIDIA says computer vision and robotics can identify and sort used clothing, bottles, plastics and other mixed waste, keeping more materials in circulation. The company cites Taiwan-based AIRECO, which uses NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX modules to operate robotic arms; accuracy on a test line exceeds 95%, while the startup plans to nearly triple annual capacity from 18,000 to 48,000 tons and cut operating costs by 85%.

According to NVIDIA, U.S. startup EverestLabs AI uses computer-vision-guided robots at facilities in North America and Australia, with about 150 robots deployed. The company estimates that the systems have identified roughly 40 billion objects, recycled about 25,000 tons of material and avoided approximately 30,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Sources: NVIDIA

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Autonomous systems are taking on part of the search for sea mines, a task traditionally performed by specialist vessels with crews of about 80 sailors. Monitored from shore, the robots may require about 20 people working in shifts, reduce costs and be transported by air with containerised control centres. The technology is also attractive to Nato navies facing recruitment and retention challenges.

The BBC reports that the conflict in the Gulf is testing more capable US systems. In early September, Iranian forces recovered a US autonomous submarine made by Anduril from the Strait of Hormuz; the Pentagon said it was an older malfunctioning model with no classified equipment. Thales, the Royal Navy and France’s Marine Nationale have also developed an uncrewed surface vehicle that uses sonar, sensors and artificial intelligence to create 3D images of the seabed and identify objects resembling mines.

Sources: BBC

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Security firm Claroc says it found 35,000 Grok Build apps whose links could be enumerated, bypassing the platform’s attempt to restrict access through hard-to-guess URLs. Opening the links exposed the data associated with the apps, including business plans, advertising proposals, medical exam results, checklists, and employee names and identification numbers.

Claroc identified 24 apps created by SpaceXSI, the name of the company formed by the merger of SpaceX and xAI. The exposed material included a confidential onboarding plan, a sales territory map covering 594 accounts, internal addresses for sales systems, and advertising proposals. SpaceXSI began removing the links within hours of Ars Technica sending questions; all 24 apps subsequently returned an “app not found” error.

Sources: Ars Technica

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Odessia founder Francis Davidson announced that OpenAI acquired the artificial-intelligence travel-agent startup and that he has joined the company to help develop the future of travel. The terms were not disclosed, and Odessia’s product has already been shut down. OpenAI did not announce or confirm the acquisition to TechCrunch, and has not presented travel-specific products or plans; TechCrunch says the deal appears to be an acqui-hire.

Odessia had raised $6 million in a Sequoia-led pre-seed round and launched its agent about five months earlier. Davidson also founded lodging startup Sonder, which went bankrupt after a partnership with Marriott fell through. OpenAI already counts companies including Bookings.com, Expedia and KAYAK among its customers or partners, according to TechCrunch.

Sources: TechCrunch

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New York opened a registration portal for large frontier AI developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic. The RAISE Act requires companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue to publish safety frameworks, issue public model transparency reports, and report critical incidents within 72 hours; registration is due by January 1, 2027. Penalties can reach $1 million for a first violation and $3 million for subsequent violations, under the oversight of the Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust (DIGIT).

Governor Kathy Hochul also launched a center at Binghamton University to independently evaluate the safety and operation of advanced AI systems and review companies’ safety frameworks with DIGIT. According to TechCrunch, the center was announced in January with $55 million in donations and capital.

Sources: TechCrunch

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Mathematician Steven Strogatz and applied mathematician Alex Townsend explore, in Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World, how mathematics underpins social media algorithms, logistics, weather forecasting, medical imaging and machine learning. In the approach presented by Strogatz, the advance of computers and, more recently, large language models and AI chatbots is pushing so-called “big math” beyond the processing capacity of individual humans.

The book examines what that shift could mean for mathematics and how society might adapt, in a context that may also include quantum computing. Strogatz is known for work on networks, chaos theory, DNA and synchronization, as well as for his science communication.

Sources: Ars Technica

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Oura announced its acquisition of Counsel Health for $625 million. The platform combines a chat-based medical experience with access to licensed physicians and was integrated into the Oura app in June. The companies plan to expand the partnership across preventive, acute, specialty and chronic care, while Counsel will continue serving existing and new enterprise partners. Counsel CEO Muthu Alagappan will become Oura’s chief clinical AI officer, along with the company’s 70 employees, Bloomberg reports, as cited by TechCrunch.

The deal comes weeks after Oura indefinitely postponed an IPO that could have been worth up to $2.2 billion, citing “uncertainty in the IPO market.” Oura also said its revenue grew 153% year over year to $533 million for the quarter ended September 30, reaching approximately $1.75 billion for fiscal 2026. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of 2027.

Sources: TechCrunch

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David Turturean, a researcher at Physical Superintelligence (PSI), used Anthropic’s unreleased Fable 5.2 model to produce a proof related to the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, which concerns whether quantum computers can solve problems faster than classical computers. Scott Aaronson, one of the researchers who posed the problem, told TechCrunch that he believes the proof is correct because it was formalized in Lean and explained by top researchers, although he still does not fully understand it. The result appears to close one possible route for quantum computers to solve certain difficult problems quickly, but not all of them.

PSI aims to turn specialized AI systems, with tools, memory and simulations, into a scientific-discovery business. For now, its revenue comes from optimizing data centers; its long-term strategy is to convert breakthroughs in theoretical physics into technologies. CEO Matt Pines told TechCrunch that validating physics results with experiments remains more difficult than working with formalized mathematics.

Sources: TechCrunch

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Google announced that Gemini Intelligence will come to more Android devices. The motorola signature 27 will be Motorola’s first device with the feature and will be available for pre-order in the U.S. on November 19; Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro XL and Pixel 10 Pro Fold will receive the latest features. Rambler, which turns speech into organized text in real time, will also be available on those devices. Task automation, for actions such as ordering food, hailing rides and booking reservations, will expand to the UK, India and Japan.

In the next few weeks, Create My Widget will let users build personalized widgets through prompts, using information from Gmail, Calendar and Search. Device Assistance will help control and troubleshoot the device through requests to Gemini. Google also says proactive suggestions will soon come to Android Auto, while Create My Widget will launch on Pixel Watch.

Sources: Google AI Blog

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Nvidia shareholders sued the company and its CEO, Jensen Huang, accusing Nvidia of omitting regulatory, commercial and national-security risks tied to the executive’s alleged extramarital relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive. The g1 reported that The New York Times had reported in October that the relationship allegedly took place; Huang admitted only that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The class action, filed in a federal court in San Jose, California, says the omissions helped artificially inflate the stock price. After the investigation was disclosed, Nvidia shares fell 4.3%, reducing the company’s market value by about US$190 billion, according to g1.

Nvidia itself created an independent committee to determine whether Huang may have been targeted in a foreign intelligence operation and whether company or US information was exposed. The company says it has found no reason to believe trade secrets were compromised, while Huang says he will cooperate with the investigation.

Sources: Tecnoblog, g1

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